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Forum Discussion
Sandshark
Jun 21, 2023Sensei
How to "fight" XRAID and win
In some previous posts, I described how to reduce and partially expand RAID while in FlexRAID mode via SSH. But back then, you could easily switch between XRAID and FlexRAID and back. At some point...
Sandshark
Jul 10, 2023Sensei
So, a follow-up.
Once you are past the 6 drives, XRAID will always (well, at least on both the 7th and 8th) convert to RAID6. So, you'll have to do the above every time. When I swapped the 8th, it at least didn't complain when I tried to convert directly to RAID5. mdadm --grow /dev/md126 --level=5 --raid-devices=8 --backup-file=/temp/mdadm-backupfile almost worked as expected. Almost because it actually converted to a 9-drive RAID6 with a missing drive (or, so cat /proc/mdstat said). But when the sync completed, I just gave it the command again and it instantly changed to RAID5.
In addition, this was the second drive I added that was even larger than any other except the 7th one. XRAID did not see the extra space on those two and create a 2-drive RAID1 from their additional space, as it would using "RAID 5 Rules". So, it clearly uses "RAID6 rules" after you exceed 6 drives and wanted 4 larger drives to create a RAID6.
But, after converting to RAID5, I issued volume_util -e auto and it did the expansion with the extra space, creating yet another RAID "layer".
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